Publications by free range statistics - R

Free text in surveys – important issues in the 2017 New Zealand Election Study by @ellis2013nz

25.09.2020

This is a quick post looking at using biterm topic modelling, a new technique for me, on the free text responses to a survey question. I’m interested in whether this type of topic modelling might be a shortcut to analysing free text, quicker than having a human read the answers and code them. The question I’m using to try this out is from the...

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Facebook survey data for the Covid-19 Symptom Data Challenge by @ellis2013nz

03.10.2020

The Covid-19 Symptom Data Challenge (under way at the time of writing this blog post) makes available two large sets of survey data. These are provided in granular but aggregate form ie no response-level microdata, at least for this Challenge. The two surveys cover the USA and the rest of the world respectively, and involve hundreds of thousands ...

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Hamlet, data models, interaction graphs and other cool stuff by @ellis2013nz

10.10.2020

You should all go watch Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) Earlier this year I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) and wow, I cannot recommend this movie enough. Not only is it by far the best Hamlet I have ever seen (on stage or screen), it has a fair claim to being the best Shakespeare ‘full stop’ (or ‘period’ as our American cousins say),...

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Reproduce analysis of a political attitudes experiment by @ellis2013nz

13.11.2020

Terence Wood, Chris Hoy and Jonathan Pryke recently published this paper on The Effect of Geostrategic Competition on Public Attitudes to Aid. I was interested a) because of my past professional engagement with public attitudes to aid (my very first real, full time permanent job was a a community campaigns coordinator for Community Aid Abroad, wh...

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Animated map of World War I UK ship positions by @ellis2013nz

04.12.2020

The other day while looking for something else altogether, I stumbled across naval-history.net, a website aiming to preserve historical naval documents and make them more available. I’m not sure if it’s still being actively worked on; the creator and key driving force Gordon Smith passed away in late 2016. The interesting collection of materi...

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Shiny in production for commercial clients by @ellis2013nz

20.12.2020

One of the more interesting projects I worked on in 2019 could be loosely described as building a Shiny app for the Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT). But this wasn’t just any Shiny app. It was the front end for a big analytical data build which precalculated many indicators (many of them newly developed for this project, such as ...

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Visualising stock prices and volume by @ellis2013nz

04.02.2021

Like many people around the world I have been watching the rise and fall of share prices in the US retail chain GameStop with interest. There is plenty of narrative and interpretation of what happened around and time will provide many details that are currently opaque, but here is my brief summary of what happened. This is based purely on what I ...

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Making a database of security prices and volumes by @ellis2013nz

13.02.2021

Motivation So, there’s been a recent flurry of attention to the stock market. It prompted last week’s post. But it also reminded me to bubble up to higher in my priority list a project to create a database of daily security prices and short positions from open data sources. Yahoo Finance is an excellent data source and the quantmod R package...

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Principal components and penguins by @ellis2013nz

13.06.2021

A short post today to get me back in the swing of it, after a four month break – my longest since starting the blog. But a short post with a warning – this is something that nearly caught me out and has potentially catastrophic but silent (ie unnoticed) consequences. It’s common in my corner of the world to take high dimensional data and tu...

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